Customize Mobile App Experience in Three Steps With CRM Data

Imagine that your credit card company emails you about its new mobile app. You install and open it, enter your login information, and are immediately greeted with a perfectly tailored offer or recommendation. Your app is automatically synced with your credit accounts, and soon, you’re scheduling payments, transferring balances, and redeeming rewards — all from your phone. The company reminds you when payments are due and alerts you to high balances. Rewards offers grow increasingly relevant and valuable. You find yourself using the app almost daily, checking in for the content and promotions as much as for the accounting features.

How can a credit card company — or any company, for that matter — deliver a mobile app experience this rich and personalized right off the bat? By using the customer data they’ve already amassed in their customer relationship-management (CRM) system. When CRM data is integrated with mobile app analytics and targeting, brands don’t have to wait to gather data through app usage alone. They can personalize the mobile app experience from first use, ensuring a level of ongoing app engagement that leads to even deeper customer insights.

Now, imagine you could give your own app users an experience this personalized and engaging.
Here’s a step-by-step view of how CRM data combines with mobile analytics to deliver rich, customized mobile app experiences from the very first login.

Step 1: Acquisition
Are you able to pinpoint what’s working and what’s not in your mobile user-acquisition strategy? Marketers can create and track multiple unique acquisition links to promote and drive traffic to their apps. Acquisition links include deep links, which open a specific, relevant section of the app rather than the homepage. When a user downloads and runs an app after clicking on your link, you automatically collect the acquisition data. You can generate reports at any time to see how your marketing links are performing and what exactly is driving users to your app.

This level of insight into mobile-user acquisition leads to important discoveries. For example, you’ll likely find that acquiring users through organic channels — like email, mobile websites, and social media — leads to higher retention rates than paid-ad acquisitions do and reduces your overall cost per install (CPI).

Step 2: Authentication
When an existing customer downloads your app, the mobile app experience should be seamlessly linked with your web, email, and social experience. Instead of creating a new, distinct account, a user should be able to enter the same credentials he uses online, tying his cross-device activities to a single customer profile. The mobile user-authentication process is your crucial opportunity to learn who is using your app and to take advantage of the information shared with you previously.

If a customer has been shopping on your e-commerce site for several years, you can draw on her CRM data to apply her interests, preferences, spending habits, location, and more to the first-time mobile app experience. This level of personalization typically takes time to create when you’re relying solely on mobile analytics. If you are able to tap into your CRM data, however, app users can enjoy experiences that are consistent with what they’re accustomed to online.

Step 3: Targeting
Remember the imaginary app you downloaded from your credit card company? To show you truly relevant in-app offers, the company needs to know your credit score, past purchases, reward redemptions, and what other cards and products you use. This information is difficult, if not impossible, to gather solely through mobile app interactions.

Without this valuable offline CRM data, targeting is clumsy — sometimes, even nonexistent. Mobile app experience, content, and functionality are one-size-fits-all, making them static, impersonal, and unhelpful (if not completely worthless). With the CRM data, on the other hand, targeting sparks an ongoing feedback loop of customer insight — you show users offers with the option to check “Don’t show this again.” Their responses enrich their customer profiles, and you can continually improve the value and relevance of their brand experiences across all channels and devices.

From Analytics to Target in One Mobile Software-Development Kit (SDK)
Acquisition links and CRM data are great launch points for mobile app user targeting and engagement, but they’re only the beginning. Once you have loyal, active app users generating even more data and insight, you can refine your mobile app experience and features to sustain engagement for the long term.

Customer-data collection doesn’t have to slow down your mobile app growth and engagement. When you free your customer data from a silo and integrate it into all digital touchpoints, customers stay engaged from authentication to your app’s tenth upgrade — and beyond! That’s why Adobe created a single app SDK that integrates with Adobe Analytics, Target, Audience Manager, and the rest of the Adobe Marketing Cloud.